alxlaz

31 ms·

271.
by alxlaz 6y ago
To make sure you're paying attention and not just clicking buttons at random on the screen, of course !
272.
by alxlaz 6y ago
IMHO (15+ years of Emacs and counting) you are not wrong. First, Emacs already has excellent LaTeX support. Unless org-mode brings you any major advantage over plain LaTeX (which I doubt it is when you're writing a paper , that's
273.
by alxlaz 6y ago
I think that quote could use a bit of nuance itself (albeit, yeah, maybe bringing up Hiroshima like that does set off Godwin's Law alarm). China can develop datasets on millions (billions?) of people and, yes, given the current state o
274.
by alxlaz 6y ago
^ This. When someone approaches you saying things like "our former sysadmin is confrontational and unhelpful", you don't just have to solve whatever problem the guy who ragequit can't solve. You also have to undo the dam
275.
by alxlaz 6y ago
"Our former system administrator is extremely uncooperative and very confrontational" or "we need to decrypt valuable customer data that we can't afford to rebuild and this is driving us towards bankruptcy" are the
276.
by alxlaz 6y ago
Lots of Unix commands could have had better names :). FWIW, though, the noun form is even less uncommon in languages that borrowed the expression from French. In my native language (also a Latin language, so borrowing it was straightforward
277.
by alxlaz 6y ago
> In practice I don't think I've ever used it, and when I was a noob I often lamented the lack of a high-level documentation of Linux which would introduce the appropriate man/info pages. It was introduced in 3.0BSD, it&#x
278.
by alxlaz 6y ago
The back story to this is that the DIGITAL Command Language (more or less the equivalent of an Unix shell), with its excellent filesystem-level features and the environment around it (e.g. the well-written and extremely thorough documentati
279.
by alxlaz 6y ago
I sympathize with the author's take that our industry is way too trigger-happy and willing to throw away perfectly working code, but none of this: > Python 3 changed all the string handling, have to make adjustments. The build is to
280.
by alxlaz 6y ago
Way closer to a junior dev than a C-level position ;-). Edit: one-year sabbaticals aside, which aren't that common outside large companies, longer vacations are normal simply because extra paid vacation days are a standard benefit you
281.
by alxlaz 6y ago
> There is no snowballs chance in hell that a company will tolerate absence of their management staff that is longer than 4 weeks. I've worked in places where, at any given time, at least one something-something manager was on a one
282.
by alxlaz 6y ago
On the other hand, this one is incorrect, so it's a bad trade-off no matter how you put it. Besides, the meaning of "stellar mass density" ought to be obvious to anyone who's gone through high-school level science clas
283.
by alxlaz 6y ago
It didn't only remove the shroud that made it difficult to work with for beginners, it made an incredible difference in terms of being able to use JavaScript for serious application development. When Firebug showed up, the JavaScript
284.
by alxlaz 6y ago
> Since absolutely every other professional industry employs some manner of uniform credentialing the only way opposing it in software, where is has not been tried in a meaningful way, makes sense is an argument from ignorance Or one fro
285.
by alxlaz 6y ago
> I take it you have never worked outside of software. You take it wrong, and reasoning by analogy with other fields is a very risky line of logic, because they're not at all similar in terms of internal regulation and professional
286.
by alxlaz 6y ago
> accept risks from intentionally violating the spirit of that limitation. What risk? Since it's the engineers, not the executives that take any oath of professional conduct, there wouldn't be any risk for any executive. All th
287.
by alxlaz 6y ago
Technical reasons aside (some of these vendors are on 20+, even 30+ year-old codebases by now), the other big reason why they are making the "wrong" product is that the "right" product avoids some vendor lock-in and make
288.
by alxlaz 6y ago
For the love of everything that is holy, if in your design the icons for "Undo" and "Jump Backwards" are practically identical -- as in this font, where only the outline of the arrows differs -- , please, please "
289.
by alxlaz 6y ago
It's almost a famous joke from behind the Iron Curtain. The original was actually slightly different: Q: What's the difference between capitalism and communism? A: In capitalism, man exploits fellow man. In socialism, it's
290.
by alxlaz 6y ago
Oh boy. I still have nightmares about this. At $former_workplace we had an entire SDK, a few hundred thousand LoCs in total, with basically no documentation whatsoever. The team that wrote most of it had long been laid off. We traded notes
291.
by alxlaz 6y ago
You could technically get 1024x768 (with really bad flickering) on anything with an AGA. Check out e.g. https://aminet.net/package/driver/moni/WBHacksAGA or https://aminet.net/package/dri
292.
by alxlaz 6y ago
Yeah, things were very bad for 10 year-old me: in English, the slimmed-down binder we use around here for, well, filing, is called a file. It made absolutely zero sense that "a folder is a collection of files" and "a file is
293.
by alxlaz 6y ago
> you could suddenly use any typeface you wanted because displays were all retina You're thinking only of Apple land, right? Most displays in the world are still 1366x768 and 1920x1080, and huge fonts and widgets everywhere is exac
294.
by alxlaz 6y ago
> it's the representations that are not really representative to everyone. That's true of virtually every graphical representation in a computer application. Save icon? How about folders ? Where I'm from, folders (the ph
295.
by alxlaz 6y ago
Well, not really in my back pocket, but I did post something similar a while back on my Twitter account. It's not like my list of grievances has changed since then :).
296.
by alxlaz 6y ago
I don't really care about "fun", but I just can't find the words to explain how happy I am that there's a chance we might put all this flat madness behind us. I'm looking forward to: * Not having this conversat
297.
by alxlaz 6y ago
> I disagree, have not seen container mentioned in PR materials for flatpak even once. Until one or two years ago hardly a month went by without one of these hitting one of the various Linux communities. I'm not sure how you missed
298.
by alxlaz 6y ago
> That they are sandboxed, or not, is very much secondary, for most users, I believe. It's been very much not secondary to the PR effort behind it. A few years ago, when the first usable releases started popping up, sandboxing was
299.
by alxlaz 6y ago
I got a touch-enabled laptop for work a few years back. I thought it was bloody amazing at first, like all those cyberpunk dreams about fancy touch screens from the early 90s came to life. Four the first six hours or so, that is. It's
300.
by alxlaz 6y ago
I don't know if/don't think that Qt's licensing is an issue for most of the people who need to make cross-platform applications and reach out for Electron. Electron seems to be the default choice not just for FOSS projec

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